Shake up at OnLive sees cloud-gaming service sold, half of employees laid off

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It’s been a manic few days for employees of the cloud-gaming service OnLive, leading to the sad news that half of the company’s staff have been laid off.

Friday saw rumours begin to circulate that OnLive would be shutting down, with a multiple employees hitting the web to state that they’d been handed their pink slips. OnLive insisted that all was well, but by the end of Friday, the company admitted that it had been sold, “acquired into a newly-formed company”, with new financial backing and retaining “a large percentage” of the workforce.

A purposefully vague statement, an employee has now come forward to tell PC Mag that “definitely over half” the team has been laid off. Not only that, but those who weren’t offered further work by the company received no severance pay, merely the wages owed for the week they worked.

There’s still lots of smoke surrounding what’s precisely happened over at OnLive, but the news is hardly surprising, as the cloud-gaming service has yet to see significant uptake among the gaming community, despite being founded on a solid idea.

Aiming to make high-end PC games available to anyone with just a compatible tablet or low spec PC, OnLive sent a user-controlled video feed of a game being controlled through a remote supercomputer back to the gamers own low-end machine of choice. However, requiring both a speedy internet connection and a subscription that meant the gamer never truly owned the games they were playing, it seems many video game fans weren’t quite yet ready to embrace the forward-thinking technology.

OnLive will however resume service as usual. The coming weeks and months will be particularly interesting though, and we hope the promising service can survive through what must be testing times.